“Chimera Two is ready for its bath!” Aba Manar yelled.
“In range now!” Lumak said, spinning the turret’s hand-wheels and swivelling the turret in the
direction of Chimera Two. The promethium tanks in the rear of the Hellhound gurgled as the main
cannon belched a thick spray of flame. The blast was just enough to lick the tyranids on the hull and
paint them with sticky fire. Many leapt off, screaming and ablaze.
Chimera Two opened her gun ports and began firing with her three remaining lasguns.
“Sir,” Aba Manar yelled, “we just lost Hellhound Four and Chimera Six from Squadron Five!
The storm is also hampering auspex and vox!”
“How many left?” Euphrates asked. “At last count, five Chimera and three Hellhounds,
excluding us.”
“Sir?” Sarrin said. “Our pocket is collapsing. We’re surrounded!”
“All remaining units,” Euphrates yelled into his micro-bead, fighting to make himself heard,
“form up. We’re going to try to punch our way out of this swarm… see if we can’t shatter it!”
“Sir, Chimera Two!” Lumak yelled.
Euphrates managed to catch the Chimera through the cupola’s visors. A large hole, melted into
the armour plate, had opened up the Chimera’s port side. Tyranids were pouring in, and filling the
micro-bead with the screams of the dying crew.
“Burn her!” Euphrates said.
Lumak opened the flamer’s nozzles on full, washing the Chimera in a blistering stream of
ignited promethium. The screams ended. The Chimera slowed to a stop, her features melted. Internal
explosions rocked her frame, her ammo bins ignited.
“What did that?” Euphrates demanded.
“A beast wielding a cannon on its back,” Aba Manar reported. He aimed and fired the heavy
bolter. It struck the simian-like creature as it prepared to fire at Euphrates’ Hellhound. The round
detonated inside it, cracking its carapace out and flowering the beast like a bloom of flesh and
muscle.
“Form up on me,” Euphrates said.
He received crackling acknowledgement from the various commanders, and within moments,
three Chimera and another Hellhound had joined his ranks. The other vehicles were too heavily
engrossed in combat, encountering heavier resistance in the form of larger beasts armed with
scythes and bio-cannons capable of splitting their armour plating.
Driving in wedge formation, Euphrates and his allies cut a path straight through the horde. The
three Chimeras broke the crest of enemies, using their heavy shovels to deflect incoming fire, while
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the two Hellhounds ran at their wings and used their flamers to protect the wedge’s flanks. The
Chimeras’ rear gunners were firing on anything that gave chase, while the storm generated licks of
electricity that shot and played off their armour.
The tyranids were blistering the Chimeras’ shovel shields, however, unleashing diamond-hard
rounds and acid bolts that weakened the plating or punched through entirely. Three cannon-backed
beasts stood in the way of the wedge.
“Cannon beasts!” Aba Manar cried.
“Shoot them, before they fire!” Euphrates said over the vox.
Bolter fire peppered the ground around the three tyranids as they took aim. One exploded from a
shell that pierced its back-mounted cannon, but the other two fired before the Chimeras piled into
them, shattering carapace and splattering viscera and bio-fluid across the desert. Their salvos,
however, struck two Chimeras, melting the shovel off one and the forward superstructure armour
plating off the second.
The driver of the first Chimera screamed over the micro-bead, the spray from an acid round
melting the windshields and spilling a drizzle of lethal droplets through. The vehicle jerked out of
control and slammed into the Hellhound next to it, their treads biting into one another, their links
unravelling in a hail of sparks and rent metal. Both vehicles ground to a halt, and the tyranids swept
over them.
“Close up formation,” Euphrates ordered, watching both vehicles vanish under a mountain of
enemies, “and barrel through them.”
The vehicles did as ordered, with two Chimeras and the Hellhound trying to drive their spear
into the breast of the swarm. More shots whizzed past, this time from the rear: a group of bipedal
tyranids armed with bio-cannons. Auspex sputtered and flared, the air electrified by the storm of
movement.
More acid rounds struck the rear of one Chimera. While they did not eat through completely,
they weakened the rear plating enough for the next solid-mass rounds to penetrate the troop cabin.
Euphrates could hear the shots ricocheting inside the vehicle over an open vox channel, the
Guardsmen screaming in pain or gurgling their last breaths. The Chimera slowed to a stop, and
Euphrates watched helplessly as tyranids rushed the vehicle.
Euphrates turned in time for a large tyranid to loom into view. It towered over the vehicles, its
four spiked arms spread in what seemed like preparation for a lethal embrace, and its mouth opened
in a deafening roar that shook Euphrates. It lowered its head, its turtle-like shell absorbing cratering
cannon fire, and rammed its bony horn through the front plate of the last Chimera. The Chimera
bucked upwards, its forward momentum brought to an abrupt end, and the treads lifted high into the
air before it came crashing down. The creature’s four arms lanced into the vehicle, buckling the
plate under the tortured cry of wrenched metal. With a flick of its mighty neck, it lifted and flipped
the vehicle over on its back.
Euphrates’ Hellhound speeded past, its flame cannon spinning to douse the great monster in
thick coats of fire. The enraged beast spun and followed the Hellhound, its blows missing the tank.
It flailed, trying to put out the flames, and Euphrates lost sight of it in the thickening dust cloud.
“What in the Emperor’s name?” Aba Manar said, forcing Euphrates to turn back around.
Directly in front of them, the tyranids parted to reveal a creature the crew had never seen before, not
even during the Absolomay Crush campaign against the tyranid splinter fleet.
The tyranid that floated into the Hellhound’s path appeared frail, its limbs vestigial-looking, its
long tail like a withered spine and its large, elongated head swept back with plate ridges that
protected an enlarged brain sac. It hovered above the battlefield, bluish tendrils of lightning snaking
off its body and striking the ground. The storm’s electricity seemed to dance around it, lending it a
halo of static fire.
Something opened in Euphrates’ mind, some protective cobwebs meant to shelter him from the
horrors of the universe, brushed aside. He shrieked, his voice echoing in the screams of his crew.
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Euphrates found himself hanging over some unimaginable gulf of time and space, a point where
sense of self is obliterated and scattered across the endless darkness. They all stared at something
ancient, something whose very being opened their perceptions to the great devouring infinity of the
hive-mind. It dwarfed them and held their speck-like intellects between the claws of its forefinger
and thumb. It drowned them out the same way an ocean might drown one’s thirst.
Sarrin jammed the steering levers in an attempt to escape the presence of the hive brain. Aba
Manar and Lumak were pushing themselves away from their stations and writhing on the floor,
crying. Only Euphrates continued staring at the creature through the cupola’s visor slits, unable to
shear his gaze or his thoughts away from it. Mind lightning slithered around the creature’s body,
building to a crescendo. It unleashed a coruscating blast from its forehead that ripped through the
Hellhound’s armour, and vaporised Euphrates and his men where they lay.
The blast dissipated, and all that remained of Euphrates was the lingering psychic scream that
lay trapped in the ash shadow that had been scorched into his armour.
Kamala Noore was trying to hear the ghosts of the lost expedition, when fresh screams erupted in
her mind, tearing through the veil of mental silence that suffocated her. She drew in a sharp gasp,
the full breath of the drowning swimmer upon reaching the ocean’s surface. Her mind was finally
clear for a moment. She knew the voices that screamed, and saw their terror in the seconds before
something obliterated them from reality and imprinted their thoughts into the debris of their vehicle.
She caught the lingering image of what killed them, an apparently frail creature whose warped body
contained unimagined power. She’d heard about tyranid psykers before, heard they were terrible
foes, but this was her first brush with one.
She recognised nothing human in its thoughts, nothing familiar. It was an alphabet of xenos
thought and words, something that would drive her insane for even uttering their tongue. The
psychic scream dissipated and the images faded, the psychic veil pushed back in place. But she felt
focused, no longer distracted by the maddening elusive songs of the expedition’s ghosts. She was
grateful for the reprieve, and vowed to thank the creature personally. She donned her psyker hood
and prepared for its arrival, eager to stretch her mind to this lethal exercise.
6
The last surviving Chimera crew, commanded by Sergeant Abasra Doori, careened off one of the
limestone pillars at the mouth of the cave network. The pillar flaked and threatened to topple, but
remained standing.
The Chimera was still rolling when the rear door popped open and the crew jumped out. Several
soldiers looked back into the vehicle cabin, but the white-haired, white-bearded Doori waved them
off. “Go!” he shouted, “I’m behind you.”
Doori turned, trying to help the driver, Private Apaul Wariby, from his seat. Wariby was a lightskinned
man in his thirties, and his stomach was wet with blood.
“I can feel it inside me,” Wariby gasped. “It’s moving.”
“We’ll get you to a medicae!” Doori said, trying to pull him.
“I won’t make it,” he said, “and neither will you if you try. Go, you stupid old man. You were a
lousy commander.”
Doori grunted. “Fine, but if you’re going to die, then you might as well die useful.” Doori
grabbed and pulled Wariby from his seat, dropping him into the cogitator chair next to him. Wariby
grunted in pain, his breathing fluttering in rapid strokes.
“You know how to use this?” Doori said, slapping the textured grips of the Chimera’s heavy
bolter.
“Yes, sir.”
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“Good… shoot at everything coming your way.”
Wariby grabbed the bolter’s grips and stared out through the armoured visors, towards the
approaching sandstorm. He was breathing hard, his eyes fighting for focus. “Run, sir.”
“Die well,” Doori said. “Emperor knows you’ve earned the rest.”
Doori ran stumbling for the tunnels when heavy bolter fire rang out across the desert. Three men
were waiting for Doori at the mouth of the tunnel and picking off the tyranids that had pulled ahead
of the packs with their lasrifles.
“Emperor take you for fools,” Doori barked. “Run!” A dozen metres or so inside the tunnel, the
sand petered away, leaving uneven but solid limestone underfoot. Hot on their heels, screaming in
hungered fury, were the waves of tyranids that had followed Doori and his men. They were minutes
behind, their screeches echoing off the rock walls, but somehow seemed much closer than that.
The tunnels were dark, the only illumination the bright stripes of lume-paint that guided them.
Doori pushed his men in the back, forcing them to run faster. They followed the glowing stripes
until they hit a painted rune on the wall denoting “one”.
“Base, this is Chimera Five. We’re the last ones through! Passing marker one!”
“Understood,” the voice said. “Marker one is primed.”
The men continued running, the sound of the tyranids growing louder and drawing closer.
Suddenly, an explosion rocked the network and shook the heavens of all their dust. Doori and his
men stumbled against the walls. Bits of rock and limestone fell, but the roof held.
“Go, go!” Doori rasped, pushing his men along. They followed the turning, winding strips of
paint, feeling as though they were doubling back on themselves… until the passage split again. This
time, the lume-paint marked a second path. Doori pointed to the passage and pushed two of his men
down the second corridor. “Draw them after you and vox in the markers!”
The two soldiers nodded as they vanished down the tunnel. The shrieks of the tyranids, quieter
for the moment, increased in pitch again.
A moment later, one of the soldiers shouted, “Marker three!” on vox.
“Marker two!” Doori rasped with his dry throat, followed by the confirmation that the
explosives were primed. Moments later, one explosion rippled through the caverns, followed by a
second and then a third. More dust poured from the ceiling, while flakes of limestone fell and
shattered on the floor.
“That’s one of the dead-end tunnels,” a voice said triumphantly over the vox.
Doori could only grunt his acknowledgement, his breathing turning into burning ragged shreds,
his sides aching and his head swimming. He could hear the tyranids’ shrieks over the thundering in
his ears. He could feel them behind him, but he dared not turn around. The passageway split again,
with paint stripes heading in either direction. Silently, Doori pushed the other soldier down the
second passage. The man complied, too exhausted to argue.
He was alone, now, not that it bothered him. Doori continued running, despite two more
explosions that rattled the walls and ground. He was slowing, his chest in aching pain and his sides
stitched with hot needles. The tyranids were gaining, how could they not? He turned around, and
saw nothing at first, but then the lume-paint further down the tunnel was flickering. They were
coming.
Doori looked ahead and saw another marker on the wall. It was half a dozen metres away. It was
a finish line he would never reach. That realisation drew its surrender from his body, and Doori
stumbled to one knee, unable to move any further.
“Marker Five and every marker along this path,” Doori said.
“Un-understood,” the voice replied.
“Stupid old man,” Doori said, chuckling, falling to all fours. The rush of tyranids behind him
drowned out the beating thunder in his ears. There was no reason to turn around any more.
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The tunnels rocked and shook at the explosions meant to winnow the tyranids’ advance, but with
each step, they grew louder and more frightening. It seemed like nothing could hold back their
